The History Channel: Battle for the Pacific review

Another noticeable crack comes with the music. The vaguely stirring epic score that has become a cliche in war games is employed once more here but in a wildly sloppy manner. Half the time that you're fighting in the game's bland jungle environments, there's no music at all. When it does play, it blares so loudly that your ear drums will revolt.

Similar problems persist with the sound design, which inexplicably features constant gunshot and explosion noises amped up so high that you'll rarely catch any of the un-subtitled dialogue. This would be more forgivable if the developers would have performed the expected courtesy of having "speech" as separate volume slider in the options, but no such luck.

There are a ton of fine shooters hitting shelves this year that are good enough to go down in history. It would be a shame to waste your money paying full price for this heap, which instead takes history down with it.

May 6, 2008